Whether you’ve started a community and it’s been abandoned or activity is extremely low, this post should help.

Low activity happens in a lot of communities and there are many reasons why this happens. But it all comes down to members not having a reason to come back or contribute.

If your community is too quiet it’s going to take some time to get members interested again. The good news is you can start now.

Your community needs content and activity to interest your members. They need to see new content coming in on a regular basis, something they can keep coming back to see what’s new.

And activity shows them that others are participating, which is a major reason many join communities to connect with the like-minded, make new connections, build relationships and knowledge they might not have access to anywhere else.

Content that attracts views

To get started, find content. You can always work on creating your own content in the future, but for now get on Google or social media and look for content your potential community members will find interesting.

This is called curating content and entire businesses have been built on curating content, so if you are good at doing this, your community can thrive.

One problem that I’ve noticed is; a lot of community managers don’t curate content regularly. Like any other type of audience, yours wants to be able to depend on finding what they want when they show up. If they do, they’ll come back often. If they don’t, they’ll stop visiting.

I suggest adding 2-3 pieces of content every day if you can. This is going to depend on how often you want people to visit. If you expect them to come weekly, then 3-5 new pieces of content a week will suffice.

Activity from other members

Members generally expect that a community will have activity from other people, not just the owner.

Since people join communities to connect, you have to provide comments, votes, submissions from others.

When reactivating your community this is hard to provide, so I suggest you do one of the things below:

1) Reach out to the most active members of the past and ask them to support you in your reactivation of the community. If you have at least 5 total people, you have a decent start for inviting others to the site, but you’ll need them to be very active.

This will most likely require you to reach out to them often to keep them active, and you might need to offer other benefits of being your refounding members.

2) Start reaching out to every member you can. This one is a less targeted approach and it involves you getting busy in email.

Start reaching out to everyone you can and engaging them by telling them what’s on your site and asking them to participate.

Messages like:

Hey, Mike! I just posted an article I think you would like on XYZ Community – could you hope on and leave your thoughts?

Jenn, we have an awesome conversation going on in XYZ Community, I’d love to hear your thoughts, could you leave them in the comments? (include link)

Hi Chris, I saw you posted an article on Twitter, that would be great for the XYZ Community, can you add it to the site? I’d really appreciate it.

You’ll want to send messages like these daily until you see enough activity that isn’t coming from your outreach.

Keep Recruiting New Members

It takes a lot of pushing to get your community to a healthy level of activity. And one final way of revitalizing it is to constantly recruit new members.

Whenever your site looks active, you should be working on marketing your community. You can do this through social media sites for free, but you’ll need a strategy.

I recommend Instagram for a lot of communities as it is very active, easy to get followers, and easy to grow.

A healthy influx of new members will add to the engagement on your site. And slowly the snowball effect of comments, submissions, and likes will take over as the community sustains itself.

If I can help you with your community, please email me at marygreencny on gmail or message me here.